Dell has taken the unusual step - for a PC vendor of its size - of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.

Frankly, I believe it is the fault of the hardware vendors in both cases. Btu in the end, if stuff doesn't work, then the reason really doesn't matter as far as in end user is concerned. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then somebody needs to fix it.

Actually, in the case of an incomplete, in-kernel, open source hardware driver, with Linux you'd be justified in (mostly) blaming the kernel developers. Not that that happens often, and this is where open source really comes into its own - because the Linux kernel devs have control over the kernel, because they have control over open source drivers, and because they demand high quality in their software, you don't get the situation where high-quality, production code suffers because of some crappy 3rd party driver. Of course, mistakes can happen, and I doubt pre-release code is that stable, but the only time I have ever seen a kernel panic on Linux that wasn't due to my own stupidity passing the boot flags was, indeed, a case of a crappily-implemented or unmaintained part of the kernel. Since that experience with ReiserFS3, I have since sworn off ReiserFS!